ALPSP announces annual awards

 The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) announced the winners of its 2014 awards at the ALPSP International Conference held last week at Heathrow, UK.

The format of awards this year was to give gold, silver and bronze awards for innovation, rather than having separate categories for different types of innovation.

The ALPSP Awards were open to any new development, product, service, launch or project which were both innovative and of significant value to scholarly communication.  

The judges awarded Gold to the open-science platform Frontiers, which applies social media to peer review to bring authors and reviewers together with the aim of better content, speedier review process and increased transparency.  

The Silver award went to IOP ebooks from IOP Publishing. The judges said that they 'recognised the boldness of IOP’s reinvention of a core business, which sets digital and the user at the heart of its strategy.'

JournalGuide from Research Square received a Bronze award. This tool helps authors to make an informed decision about the best journal for their research.  It is said to be particularly beneficial to early career researchers and those working in regions where academic publishing is developing rapidly.

Also shortlisted were: bioRxiv from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; Edifix from Inera Inc; ReadCube Connect from Labtiva; and RightsLink for Open Access from the Copyright Clearance Center.

This year’s ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing was awarded to Fred Dylla, executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics ‘in recognition of his efforts to develop and implement creative solutions for broadening access to scholarly publications’.